Medical research on cats inspired Belcampo to write a ‘diamonds in the belly’ love story

The writer Belcampo (Herman Pieter Schönfeld Wichers, 1902-1990) is considered the greatest fantasist in Dutch literature. But no matter how fantastic, the stories are often based on a fact from reality. “Enlargement and reduction are the simplest and therefore the very first means for the imagination to deviate from reality,” he said. A good example is the story Love’s Triumph Ione of his first stories, which recently got a surprising ending.

Checkers in body

Theophilus, the main character of the story, allows visitors at the fair to look inside his body through windows for a fee: “Here through this window you get a look into one of the lungs. The lungs, as you all know, are spongy objects and serve to keep the body moist and cool. You can clearly see the expansion and contraction as a result of breathing.” After the performance, a girl, the daughter of a glazier, approaches him. She asks how the diamonds were placed in his body. When she kisses him, he starts to cry. Her breath made the “most beautiful flowers” ​​on the diamonds. After much hesitation, she asks him how it goes when you die. “I will die slowly,” he said softly, “then you can see it clearly.”

When Theophilus is dead, flowers no longer want to appear on the windows when the girl breathes on them. “She got angry and hit the glass with her fists. Then cracks appeared. These were the skeletons of the flowers and with them Theophilus was buried.”

Belcampo TB patient

As a TB patient, Belcampo underwent treatment in Davos at a young age. He discovered a crematorium in the area, where the stoker allowed him to watch the combustion through a few holes in the oven door. Years later, in a letter to Tine van Buul from Querido publishers, he would mention this experience as one of the things that influenced his literary work. The fact also plays a role Love’s Triumph I definitely along. But the spark that spread from reality to his fantasy was caused by a story from a medical student who told him that cats had had windows inserted to see the functioning of certain organs. The story appeals to Belcampo. Particularly because of his fascination with the ‘organic inner self’: “What was more obvious than to also introduce these windows to humans,” he writes in one of his explanations in The first Dutch fifty (1983)“and, adding a bit of Heine-like ironizing of love, the whole story is ready.”

Founder of Emma Children’s Hospital

After a recent publication about this story, I received an email from a retired pediatrician who said that the student’s story refers to the PhD research of Reinder Johan (Rein) Harrenstein, the first pediatric surgeon in the Netherlands and founder of the Emma Children’s Hospital in Amsterdam , who received his doctorate for the thesis in 1918 Peritoneal adhesions. During the study, ‘belly windows’ were fitted to animals. The proof is on the cover of the dissertation: a rhyming picture, flanked by standing cats. The right cat does indeed have a window in its body. Sometimes it’s just a small step from reality to fantasy.